[Reader-list] Christopher Hitchens: Mommie Dearest-Response

[Waquar Ahmed]

I do not know whether Mother Teresa is a saint or not, nor am I in a 
position to comment as to whether the Vatican is correct as regards to her 
beatification. However, I had met Mother Teresa in 1995 in St. Xaviers' 
College Calcutta and I have seen the ' Sisters of Charity' work amongst the 
poor, the downtrodden and the sufferers and I have no doubt about the fact 
that the kind of work MT was doing and the love she had in her heart for 
fellow human beings transforms her from an ordinary human being to an 
extra-ordinary human being. Sighting few of her views and quotations out of 
context does not prove her to be evil, a fanatic or a fundamentalist. When 
she ran her hand over my head and blessed me, she did not ask for my 
religion. People like Mother inspires us to dedicate our lives to the 
service of humanity. We need more people like her in this world if we have 
to save the world from all the turmoils of war, genocides, fanaticism, 
communalism, riots, pogroms that it is going through right now.

Waquar Ahmed


At 12:30 PM 10/23/2003 +1000, geert lovink wrote:
>Mommie Dearest
>
>The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a
>fraud.
>
>By Christopher Hitchens
>
>I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved
>great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and
>contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more
>serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman
>who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part
>of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.
>
>It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to
>be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the
>first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This
>was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of
>dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in
>1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train,
>including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to
>test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and
>has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as
>far back as the 16th century.
>
>As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely
>any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the
>fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light
>emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home,
>and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan
>Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place
>and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of
>prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's
>investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but
>only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show
>of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in
>this case, it got.)
>
>According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di
>Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior
>cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored
>making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to
>speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own
>lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian
>Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or
>advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as
>the process possesses, has already been done.
>
>During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the
>stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all
>suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work
>and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was
>ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms.
>Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are
>not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of
>peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when
>receiving the Nobel Peace Prize *. Believers are likewise enjoined to
>abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban
>on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT
>demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in
>1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was
>pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the
>marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one .
>
>This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold
>indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the
>poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She
>said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the
>only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the
>emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory
>reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking
>misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose
>rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln
>Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?
>The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it
>always had been-she preferred California clinics when she got sick
>herself-and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have
>her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred
>countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is
>modesty and humility?
>
>The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate
>their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist
>for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they
>have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was
>permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up
>questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly
>disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the
>"Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story.
>George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi-that saints should
>always be presumed guilty until proved innocent-was drowned in a Niagara
>of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
>
>One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack
>medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous
>healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their
>crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free
>ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of
>logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that
>what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
>evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of
>extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human
>personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of
>MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was
>a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially
>protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign
>of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
>
>Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her
>Nobel Peace Prize lecture
><http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html> , Mother
>Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world
>peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest
>destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except
>to praise "natural" family planning.( Return to corrected sentence.)
>
>Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the
>book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
><http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2VXL
>2BZ3NV&isbn=185984054X&itm=1> .
>
>Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2090083/
>
>
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